Company Wants To Beam TV Ads To Mobile Devices So You’ll Be Forced To Pay Attention

Hey, you. Yeah, you, the one with the audacity to be playing Sugar Smashers or looking at the weather on your phone/tablet while the commercials are on. You need to be paying attention, and so ads on TV should be beamed directly to your phone and/or tablet to make sure you are. Well, that’s according to one company’s nightmarish vision of our TV-watching future, at least.

Not only would these ads be arriving on your phone, but Xaxis’ new Sync technology would be able to figure out which ads to send to you using behavioral data about where you live, what you’re watching, and things like whether or not you’re logged into home WiFi or on the go, reports AdAge.

See, Xaxis knows that advertisers are frustrated by restless audiences who refuse to sit still and watch ads when they’re on. Instead, we’re getting up to attend to things or looking down at our phones.

Sync would give advertisers the ability to beam ads onto TV watchers’ mobile devices while those same ads are airing on their TV screens, in a nutshell.

“One of the biggest challenges that advertisers have right now, especially when it comes to buying broadcast television, is that up to 50% of people that are watching broadcast television are also engaging with another device,” said Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser in an interview with Ad Age. “What we’re trying to do with Sync is to solve the problem of users being distracted by their mobile device from the TV.”

What the company doesn’t say is who in the heck out there will be willing to sign up for the opportunity to see more ads than the ones we already sit through. Because my hand is far, far from raising itself up on that account.